Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series | Space Time

Today the humble sound wave is going to open the door to really understanding Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and, ultimately quantum fields and Hawking radiation. Get your own Space Time t­shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer | Space Time One of the most difficult ideas to swallow in quantum mechanics is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. It expresses the fundamental limit on the knowability of our universe. We’ve discussed it in our early videos on quantum mechanics, but it’s time we looked a little deeper. See, the apparent weirdness of the uncertainty principle hints at the even weirder underlying reality that gives rise to it. The universe we experience seems to be constructed of singular particles with well-defined properties. But this intuitive, mechanical reality is emergent from underlying reality in which the particles that form matter arise from of the combination of an infinity of possible properties. And forget matter - the vacuum itself is the sum of infinite possible particles. If we fully unravel this idea we’ll be on the verge of tackling things like Hawking radiation. But as you’ll see today, in that unraveling we are led, unavoidably, to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Graeme Gossel and Matt O'Dowd Produced by Rusty Ward Graphics by Kurt Ross Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas William James Sidis Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Y2 Justin Lloyd Tambe Barsbay Hypernova Edmund Fokschaner Max Levine Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann Mechanically Cryptic Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Dykstra Chris Hicks Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Daniel Lyons Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell J Rejc Amy Jie Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Shannan Catalano Florian Stiglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Jessica Fraley Loro Lukic Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US market. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.